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Truth? Fiction? Journalism? Award Goes to . . .

Journalists like to think of themselves as presenting as accurate a picture as they can of the real world.

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists takes a broader view. It is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, "State of Fear," dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects.

The book is "demonstrably garbage," Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.

As for the book, he added, "I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance."

The book has high-profile admirers, though. One is Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Mr. Nation said there had been "some pushback" on the award from association members who had written to association publications to protest it. "Whenever you get to the global warming issue you have legitimate scientists on both sides of the issue, as we do in our own membership," he said.

But he praised Mr. Crichton as "a high-profile writer" who had brought attention to the topic "to really create some good." He said readers would "have a very good informational read" about science and sometimes the way science is made."